For Comedian Mandel, Being Bald Is Being Clean

December 28, 2005|By Bill DeYoung The Stuart News

These days, it's good to be Howie Mandel. The veteran stand-up comic, who became a star on the dramatic series St. Elsewhere in the 1980s, is riding high thanks to his hit hidden-camera bits on The Tonight Show, which spun off into a limited series on Bravo called Hidden Howie. With a pinhole camera inside the bridge of his phony glasses, he gets regular people to do outrageous things. Yuk-yuk.

Mandel brings a suitcase full of laughs to Florida this week, with appearances in Stuart Thursday, Orlando Friday and Fort Lauderdale on New Year's Eve.

He was on TV every night last week, hosting Deal or No Deal, an Americanized version of a smash European game show in which contestants pick one briefcase out of 26, hoping it contains $1 million.

In a phone interview from Las Vegas, Mandel, 50, answered questions about the important things in his life.

Q. OK, Howie, so why are you bald?

A. I thought it would be neat to shave my head for the character I was playing in a movie, but I didn't tell my wife I was gonna do it. This was in 1999. I walked in the house like that and she went "Oh my God, that is so sexy." That was the first time she'd ever said that. I thought, "So for the last 25 years, who the hell have I been?"

And I also have obsessive compulsive disorder, and I'm a germophobe. I haven't shaken a hand in three or four years. And I found, in the midst of shaving my head, that I felt -- probably psychologically -- cleaner. It kind of played into my disorder. When you have a shaved head, there's an overall sense of being somewhat cleaner.

Q. How do you deal with that, when someone on the street sees you and wants to shake hands?

A. I've talked about it enough on TV, on The Tonight Show and Regis, but there's the odd person that gets upset with me and thinks I'm being [a jerk] because I won't extend my hand, but most people understand. When I was young, I took 30 or 40 showers a day, and washed my hands into the hundreds of times a day until my skin was raw.

When I was doing my talk show [in 1998], Paramount didn't want me to say anything about it, because people might think I was a looney.

Q. How do you describe your stage act?

A. Everything I've ever been punished for, hot for or expelled for is what I get paid for. Even though I'm a stand-up comic, I always found more humor in reality than a joke. As soon as I hear that a guy, a duck and a rabbi walk into a bar, it's almost not funny, because I know a guy, a rabbi and a duck never walked into a bar. A big part of my set is improv, it's in the moment, it's happening that night. Whatever happens that night becomes what it's about. The awkward silence and the electricity of doing improv and not knowing what's going to happen next, drives me more. I find it a lot more entertaining than telling jokes.

Q: Do people always expect you to have the camera and pull some stunt?

A. No, if they come up and approach me they see that I don't have on the glasses. What's amazing is that I don't really wear a costume -- I am me, and I put on a pair of glasses -- and they still don't recognize me. They'll tell me later when they sign the releases, "I thought it was a little off, but I didn't want to say anything."

Q. Will you use the cameras in your Florida shows?

A. They're always with me, and if I get there early enough and I see something that's funny I'll grab the camera and put it on. It's a multimedia kind of show, and hidden cameras are definitely a part of it.